SMX East Recap: SEM Track Day 3 Highlights

For the final day of SMX, the SEM track was made up a number of smaller sessions. So rather than try and individually recap all of them, I’m going to give some of my favorite insights & tips from the day’s speakers.

Your Mobile PPC Sucks (But It Doesn’t Have To)

Maddie Cary – Director of Paid Search, Point It

Your mobile performance is probably going to look different, and likely worse, than desktop, but this isn’t because mobile doesn’t work. Mobile audiences are the same audiences as desktop, but they have different needs. Mobile is often used for research and immediate action, whereas desktop is where longer-term conversions are completed, many of which started on mobile.

Your Retargeting Sucks (But It Doesn’t Have To)

Elizabeth Marsten – Director of Paid Search, CommerceHub

People have understood the need for remarketing (repeating your advertising over and over again until it has an impact on your customer) since the 1800s.

Good retargeting should start with what you want users to do.

Facebook dynamic retargeting ads (ads that show the specific products a user was looking at) often provide a better return than Google’s ads.

Getting Images Right in Paid Search

Rob Lenderman – Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer, Boost Media

Joshua Graham – Manager – Search Engine Marketing, Hilton Worldwide

John Lee – Managing Partner, Clix Marketing

Using short snippets of stock video with overlays and animations can make it look less staged and more like user-created content.

Some audience members revealed that they have been participating in a beta for visual sitelinks in AdWords. These visual sitelinks seem very much like another attempt at image extensions, this time for mobile and scrollable like Facebook carousels. In fact, a number of AdWords features originated on Facebook, including customer match.

RLSA Will Save the Day!

Larry Kim – Founder & CTO, WordStream

CPCs have been going up and conversion rates have been going down. RLSA is more cost efficient to use in these competitive times as the only people that see your ad are already familiar with your brand. They’ve found that “the most discriminating signal between a good click and a bad click is brand affinity.”

“The goal of marketing is to create a bias in the customer’s mind,” so that when they are ready to buy your product, they will pick your company. Therefore, you can’t wait until they’re ready to buy, you have to reach them before that.

Search ads do not create demand, they take advantage of existing demand. Someone searching for your product already wants to buy your product, they just haven’t decided from who. Therefore, a potential strategy is to do only RLSA for your search ads since that audience is highly qualified, and use the rest of the money to try and generate more demand with Display and Social Media ads.

The Lowdown on Google Customer Match One Year Later

Andy Taylor – Senior Research Analyst, Merkle

Customer match is similar to RLSA in that you’re reaching people that have already interacted with your brand. However, customer match makes up a much smaller amount of traffic than RLSA (about 2% of total spend for Merkle)

The match rate (matching an email address on a list to a Google account) is much lower for B2B lists than B2C.

The problem with Similar Audiences for Remarketing and Customer Match is that even though they match similar user characteristics, it is difficult to model an existing relationship with a brand.

Customer match will get better as matching techniques get better and more people use Gmail.

The Most Important 2016 eCommerce KPI

Sites with more mobile traffic had better conversion rates as people research on mobile and convert on desktop.

Improving site speed correlates to an increase in conversion rate.

Not all bounce rates are bad, sometimes people are looking only for specific info. Or with mobile, they simply move on to the next item in their news feed, after reading your article, instead of staying on your site.

They found no correlation between bounce rate and conversion rate.

Overall traffic, site speed, and especially AdWords traffic had the highest correlation with conversion rates. We’ve talked about site speed, overall traffic makes sense since the biggest sites often have strong brand recognition, and AdWords traffic is high-intent and qualified traffic.

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